There’s a question to which no artwork has an answer, to which every artwork is susceptible, which is, so what?

This Autumn, the Institute of Contemporary Arts presents the first UK exhibition by US artist Seth Price. Spanning the entire building, this survey focuses on Seth’s film & video of the past two decades. Seth Price circa 1981 is co-curated by the Institute’s Director Stefan Kalmár, Chief Curator Richard Birkett, and Head of Design Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey. As Kalmár’s inaugural exhibition as Director, it flags the Institute’s renewed commitment to addressing the complexity of the contemporary condition, and the critical role of the arts in its mediation.

There is no answer. You ask it of yourself, as an artist, and there’s only silence.

While art typically functions as a reflection of the world around it, it is also and always a product of that world. In today’s digital, networked environment Seth’s work is a manifestation of perpetually changing processes of production and distribution. Working since the late 1990s, he has amassed a body of work and writing that reflects these phenomena, including sculpture, drawing, print, film & video, music, text, textile, and web design. His work has often appeared to pre-empt the rapid developments of today’s online image-based culture, as it has become increasingly dominated by the aggregation, manipulation, formatting and recycling of images and other graphic materials.

It’s not a nihilistic question, or pointless skepticism, because the silence produced is actually useful.

For Seth, it is impossible to isolate an artwork from its means of distribution and its economy of circulation. He embraces ‘contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur’ by occasionally disseminating works online, and at irregular intervals reworking and updating them. As such, Seth operates at a remove from the platitude of technological progress, instead mining the strange, abstract and often banal residues of digital technologies; emphasizing aesthetic effects as modes of power, and the figure of the artist as both a commercial profile and discursive actor.

This silence records an echo: the artist has made a noise and prepared some kind of recording device to capture the echo that comes back.

While studying literature and politics at Brown University in the 1990s, Seth took a class on film and video with experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton. In focusing on the moving image, Seth Price circa 1981 acknowledges Seth’s early emphasis on film & video. It also highlights his work’s palimpsest tendencies – reconstituting and versioning material across multiple formats, then dispersing it through multiple channels. Seth Price circa 1981 is itself an act of un-administered circulation and reconstitution, as Seth requested not to be involved in any decisions concerning the selection and presentation of his own work.

Your utterance now has a shadow that cannot be cast off. This shadow is the work.

Price’s moving image work collapses other artistic actions or events, including aspects of performance, writing, public speaking, musical composition and installation. His own voice is a recurring presence, meandering between fictional narrative, personal testimony and philosophical treatise, as affected and mediated as the visuals it accompanies. Featuring over 20 works produced since the late 1990s, this exhibition includes Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance (2003) and Copyright 2006 Seth Price (2006), which variously make use of appropriated imagery from sources such as advertising, news footage, and video game graphics; and Redistribution (2007 – ongoing) and Digital Video Effect: ‘Editions’ (2006), which reflexively cannibalise and comment on earlier works.

‘Where we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures, we have concealed the truth ...’.

Hreinn Friðfinnsson presents, in his seventh exhibition at the gallery, works from the last three decades of his artistic practice as well as a new, extensive installation.
The artist frequently works with the most simple everyday materials, altering them with precise minimal interventions, such as in his iconic work Sanctuary (1992–2014). The work consists of a cardboard box installed as an object on the wall at eye-level. Its top flaps are slightly opened to reveal an intense green colour shimmering on the inside of the cross-shaped object, suggesting an unfathomable, seemingly sacred space. In this slightly altered readymade, Friðfinnsson unfolds the conceptual and poetic potential of seemingly banal things that already exist. His lyrical conceptualism is close to the work of Marcel Duchamp as well as Arte Povera and Land Art. Characteristic of his work— which focuses on the most ephemeral, fleeting qualities of the world around him—is, however, a subtle sense of humour and the acknowledgement of a supernatural dimension. Narrative as well as a specific perception of landscape are deeply ingrained across his body of work. Landscape is conceived of as the result of a symbiosis of nature and psyche, rooted in the memories and sagas of his native Iceland.
In his new installation Hulduklettur (“black” or “concealing rock”—from the Icelandic huldur, meaning “dark” or “concealed,” and klettur, meaning “rock”) the artist presents a rugged landscape of cardboard boxes, amongst which can be found a variety of artefacts like ammonites, crystals, an anatomical model of an ear, images of a Nautilus and galaxies. Together, they form a complex picture of natural phenomena, the unifying element being the Fibonacci spriral. The spiral, which is considered to be the epitome of Fibonacci’s mathematical system, is understood as a kind of growth pattern and fundamental principle of nature. This symbiotic relationship between mathematics, philosophy, and aesthetics is executed as well in the work Principle and Temptation (1991), whose individual squares are proportioned according to the golden section, a calculation likewise derived from the Fibonacci sequence.
Illustration (2014) is comprised of two photographs and a Mirage instrument to illustrate a three-dimensional reflection and literally illustrates Friðfinnson's legendary House project: In 1974 he built an house in a remote area of Iceland, turning it inside-out. This first house was followed by several manifestations, each of which gradually dematerialized with every new version. The fourth manifestation, which has been exhibited at Skulptur Projekte Münster this year, is an outline of the original house’s frame, made from highly reflective steel—a kind of echo of the first house. The spherical Mirage object exhibited in the gallery creates a hologram of the house’s outline that seems to float above a volcanic landscape. The hologram is the dematerialized, mirrored version— thereby becoming the memory of all previous manifestations of the house, a container of all possibilities, reflecting the genesis of the first house.
Study In Black III (2010) echoes this idea of an imagined world: in this case, using the mirror as a paradigm of art. The installation consists of a rectangular black mirror, a historic Claude Mirror, which served as an optical aid to artists in the 18th century; and a photograph of such a mirror. The work takes up the traditional mode of looking at landscape and framing the world, while at the same time throwing it back at the viewer and the exhibition space, which appears as a landscape itself, reflected in the black mirror—thereby being the ultimate monochrome image. Study In Black III is thus also a reflection on how we actually construct an idea of “landscape,” and the desires lying at the core. The video Untitled (Books) (2005–09) shows books scattered across the Icelandic tundra, the wind turning their pages, as if they have always been part of the landscape.
Born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, Iceland, Hreinn Friðfinnsson has been living in Amsterdam since 1971. He was co-founder of the Icelandic avant-garde artists’ collective SÚM and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. He recently had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Amsterdam (2015); The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík (2014); Bergen Museum and Malmö Konsthall (both 2008); Reykjavik Art Museum and Serpentine Gallery, London (both 2007); Domaine de Kerguehennec, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Bignan, and Kyoto Art Center (both 2002). He participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017. In 2012 he participated in the 30th Sao Paulo Biennial and in 1993 represented Iceland at the 45th Venice Biennale. Recent significant participations include group exhibitions at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture / GCCC, Moscow, and Mudam Luxemburg (both 2014) MOCA Los Angeles and Haus der Kunst, Munich (both 2012), Reykjavik Arts Festival (2005); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2004). In 2000 the artist was the recipient of the prestigious Ars Fennica Prize. Hreinn Friðfinnsson has been exhibiting with Galerie Nordenhake since 1989.
With many thanks to Thomas Schirrwitz and the Archery Departement at Turngemeinde in Berlin 1848 e.V.
Exhibition: November 25, 2017 – January 13, 2018
Please contact the gallery for further information and press images

For his fourth exhibition at the gallery, Andrew Lewis presents a set of seventeen oil paintings that compose a form of pictorial documentary-fiction around the major innovations of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the field of knowledge and telecommunications.

Andrew Lewis anchors the starting point of his narration in the post industrial revolution era, which sees the culmination as well as the first contestations of the positive idea of technical progress. Focused primarily on the Victorian era - with a few exceptions such as the Parisian subway map (Bienvenue Bleuet, 2017) and the John Hancock Center, Chicago’s iconic skyscraper (Otis Platform, 2017) - through the strange encrypted and extremely documented portraits of their inventors, the artist portrays a series of technological innovations, their applications and evolutions over the following centuries. For example, the conversion of the Crystal Palace site, originally built to host the first world exhibition of 1851 and then converted into a television and radio transmitter; the Geissler tube (1857) and the Crooks tube (1870s) whose applications revolutionized science and new technologies; or John Logie Baird (1888-1946), an engineer known for having invented the first system for the broadcasting of television images.

In spite of their mysterious character, Andrew Lewis’s paintings are animated by a great educational concern. Education and entertainment are the keywords. Halfway between technical drawings and the 1980s educational animations, they work with images and keywords to assemble the pieces of a puzzle. This is the case of Sir Christopher Cockerell’s “portrait” (Sir Christopher Cam Cams, 2017), whose life is traced through images of his inventions (including the hovercraft) and his biographical references listed on a keyboard, recreating a kind of painterly epitaph. Free from any space/time limit, the works of Andrew Lewis are like time machines. More than forms of homage to famous characters or inventions, they come to display and make visible, by means (and with the limits) of painting, some historical moments of transition.

However, far from being hymns to progress, these canvases are painted in an aesthetic both old and futuristic. Rather than conveying nostalgia for an era or past glory they display an ambivalent feeling of admiration and muffled anxiety, allowing Andrew Lewis to retranscribe the erosion of blind belief in technical progress.

The gallery is also very pleased to present a new site-specific work by Beijing-based artist Liu Zhan. A founding member of the art collective UNMASK, the exhibition is his first project as a solo artist and incorporates video, printed material, found objects, and sculpture together into a site-specific installation.

After discovering a vast number of bootleg artworks related to UNMASK, Liu has initiated a project investigating the wider mechanics of legal, social, technological and commercial processes, which together define the labor of an artist working today. Examining the role of artist subjectivity in relation to these dynamics, he follows a trail of encounters leading beyond the confines of the contemporary art world and into a parallel, more complex reality of informal shanzhai economies. The Mysteries of Animal Reproduction eschews a moralistic position to the copies. He instead looks to unravel a network of relations so dispersed that they transcend beyond the autonomy of a given object, and that has expanded into a system so vast that it is impossible to comprehend in its entirety. Trained as a sculptor, Liu employs different skills in order to rationalize and forge his own way of connecting back to the original artwork he was once was author to. The artwork has since undertaken a long detour, proliferating into multiple versions beyond his control, and the artist observes how these newly augmented sculptures thrive within an ecology of ad-hoc indigenous vendors, flexible factory work floors, mail-to-order production lines and speculative enterprises that span multiple geographies.

The exhibition alludes to a wider continuum of a history of art filled with works of questionable provenance, infringements of intellectual property, which happen within an economy of appropriation. The components of his original sculpture have evolved through the reverse engineering of others - echoing the dynamic of natural selection - their formal qualities have been overridden by adaptations determined by questions of efficiency, automation, craftsmanship and commercial survival. Liu has followed the elliptical journey of this sculpture, coming back full-circle to the original site of its first exhibition appearance, returning with a newly mutated body and displayed inside of a vitrine. A video and newspaper give insight to online conversations that position the artist directly in relationship with his counterfeiters, using a loop interspersed with footage from animal documentaries and other content. Displayed on the floor, Liu channels his experiences, creating a new sculpture controlled by a set of intuitive responses to the shanzhai object. Facing an endemic phenomenon that expands far beyond the intentions of the artist, the new sculpture is an attempt to reclaim something back. Rather than forcing redundancy onto the artist, the installation proposes a series of counter-methods to the audience.

Liu Zhan (b.1976, Luoyang) currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Sculpture Department, China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2002.